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Amazon will require employees return to the office 3 days a week

• batter 4y ago
  'ideal time' to do that. Lets see what others will do.
• synu 4y ago
  I guess they figure the threat of layoffs will cow anyone who might resist. We will see if that's true.
• banach 4y ago
  Great way to contribute memberships to the Amazon Union.
• MasterScrat 4y ago
  Now that we have some distance from the whole forced-at-home-during-pandemic episode, what are people's opinions on the topic? I do feel seeing people face to face a couple of times per week does help teams function better. Random water-cooler conversation lead to meaningful ideas. Overhearing team members talking about some related problem gives you the chance to jump in. Also better for overall motivation from what I've experienced.
  • xyzelement 4y ago
    Exactly right. As an employee and a father of young kids, I love WFH. As a manager, and someone who values creativity and productivity, I know that there's a HUGE tax being paid from people not being physically together, exactly as you described. To the extent that everyone WFH, the tax is paid uniformly. But once people head back to the office, teams and companies that have more physical presence together will outperform and put the other people out of business.
    • 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
      That's possible, but you could make the argument about any perk. Having free lunches, or paying high salaries puts companies at a disadvantage relative to competitors, all else equal. But if you free people to focus on what matters, and attract more competitive talent, it might balance out. Especially in light of attracting more competitive talent, it remains to be seen how it will balance out.
      • misterprime 4y ago
        Good point. Also consider this scenario: Direct competitors choose different WFH policies. Company A: exclusively in-office. Company B: exclusively WFH. Company B can allocate all the savings from office space and infrastructure towards increased employee compensation (or whatever else they choose to spend on). Will the cost of office space prove valuable for the benefit of the in-person bonus performance? I think that a "Company C" that kept all their office space and still allowed employees to exclusively WFH would be making a mistake.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • 11235813213455 4y ago
      it's possible that the "team" concept works better when reunited physically. Working at distance, there are misunderstandings, and more difficulty to communicate, synchronize our views, etc.. But, I do have at least twice more energy and productivity if I work from home, and choose when to eat, go for a walk (and have good ideas at that time usually), when to sleep, no commuting, no worries like dresscode etc.. So for small companies, I believe distance working can be very interesting
    • DanHulton 4y ago
      Citation needed. I'd be willing to say that companies that work in ways that require more physical presence and _have it_ will outperform companies that require more physical presence and _don't have it._ But the companies that adapt to remote work and aren't trying to just do everything the same way they did before should be able to continue to compete at a high level. They have before, there's no reason why they shouldn't continue to be able to.
  • the_snooze 4y ago
    Yup, being in-person lowers the friction to asking questions and exchanging ideas. It's way easier to gauge people's understanding of things when working with them in the same space than having to explicitly coax it out of them over chat or video.
    • iLoveOncall 4y ago
      > being in-person lowers the friction to asking questions and exchanging ideas This is a downside, not a benefit. I don't want to hear about your compilation error when I'm heads down on my own work.
      • the_snooze 4y ago
        We're very explicit about it in our hiring process. Our culture is that team leads serve to mentor junior people. If we introduce barriers to question-asking, then we're shooting ourselves in the foot. "Shut up and code" isn't our culture, by choice, and we let candidates sort themselves out accordingly.
        • SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
          What stopped your team lead from regularly reaching out via teams/slack/zoom and from letting the juniors know they were available and open to communicate?
          • the_snooze 4y ago
            Absolutely nothing. I'm the team lead and I bug people all the time for their questions and ideas. Quite explicitly so, like "why aren't you reaching out to me with questions?" But it's like trying to squeeze water out of a rock when they're online. But when I call them into the office to chat in person, then they have tons to talk about. With few exceptions, juniors are in the default mindset that they're bothering people when they have problems. My job is to socialize them out of that. I accomplish that by bringing them into the office, because the alternatives very rarely work.
  • Spivak 4y ago
    As with all things, it depends on the person. My motivation is shot in an office, wfh is the most productive and least tired from work I've ever been. No more doom scrolling on Reddit when I need a break, everything is in chat so it's searchable and you can't miss anything. When we need to get together for something we just hang out in a call. I imagine it's gonna be a generational thing where older folks won't acclimate to "hanging out" in a digital space. Having tools like Slack/Discord change the game completely.
  • bobleeswagger 4y ago
    Office culture matters a ton and greases the gears. What we had pre-pandemic was good enough, and required employees to show their employers they were capable of remote work. Now, the bar is lower... you tell me what that does to the quality of work over a long period.
  • pugworthy 4y ago
    Agreed. It also helps newer employees better integrate with existing teams that have a past history of face to face. Our project team of 20 has only 1 person who's always home now - but it seems to be basically a social anxiety / hypochondria issue. With the rest of the team onsite, those that stay home get forgotten a lot - out of site, out of mind.
  • ignoramous 4y ago
    Jassy seems to agree: https://youtube.com/watch?t=2190&v=izbg7CpoSqg https://youtube.com/watch?t=2190&v=izbg7CpoSqg
  • drusepth 4y ago
    Definitely won't be going back to a physical office, but I understand some people prefer it and/or struggled with working remotely. A little sad that some companies are moving to a limited-hybrid approach instead of making either option available for whatever works best for each employee.
  • sefrost 4y ago
    I don't have children and my partner goes in to the office 4 days a week. I realized I was sitting alone in my apartment for 8 hours a day and that was quite a sad thought I haven't been able to shake. I started going in to the office with a few of my team members 2 days a week, but the vast majority don't want to. That's fine - I don't want to be the person that makes people do things they don't want to. But I joined this company during the pandemic when all offices were closed and I have learned so much and made some really important professional connections simply by turning up to the office and meeting people there. It feels like you can have more 'casual' yet still work-related chats in person that I've never been comfortable having on video calls for some reason. WFH we are in silos. Maybe that's okay for people who were a part of the organization before WFH.
    • eyko 4y ago
      It would be interesting to see what career trajectories people that work exclusively from home have, when compared to people that work in offices. What you say about professional connections rings very true. Most work related friendships I have are people I met in person, be it in an office or at meetups.
  • brotoss 4y ago
    I would love to see some empirical evidence surrounding these magically enlightening "water cooler" conversations that managers claim creates value out of thin air, because I am convinced it is just lip service from managers and capital holders to justify their existence
    • darkwizard42 4y ago
      I don't know about empirical evidence but surely personal experience must lend some credence to this topic. It is far easier to just hit a whiteboard with a colleague (all virtual options for this are always a mess) and iterate quickly. I wouldn't know how we would get empirical evidence but collaboration in the office is definitely valuable...I think the debate now is: is it worth all the downsides of commuting and colocating around high COL areas
      • dudul 4y ago
        Surely, definitely, and at the end no evidence. It is also valuable to be at home in a quiet environment.
      • Root_Denied 4y ago
        "The plural of anecdote is not data" is a saying I feel like I've been using a lot the last few years.
    • __derek__ 4y ago
      Knowing Amazon, the S-team absolutely used real data about productivity/cohesion/resilience for teams that spend more time in the office to make this decision, but they are absolutely not going to share it with anybody else.
      • fmajid 4y ago
        They do seem to be more analytical and data-driven than most, as with their "WBR" methodology, so I would give them some benefit of doubt: https://commoncog.com/goodharts-law-not-useful/#:~:text=Amazon%20does%20it.-,How%20the%20WBR%20Accomplishes%20This,-In%202000%2C%20Amazon https://commoncog.com/goodharts-law-not-useful/#:~:text=Amaz... (if you don't have a Chromium-based browser, scroll to the heading "How the WBR Accomplishes This").
  • drewg123 4y ago
    The other side is: - watercooler conversation is not searchable and is ephemeral, so team members that have valuable input may not even know the conversation occurred. Had the conversation taken place on slack or some other chat system, others with valuable input would see it and chime in. And somebody looking for context can search for the conversation years from now. - the office is full of distractions, from unrelated teams in the same space doing some kind of team building to co-workers phone calls, to random irrelevant conversations between coworkers that I have to tune out. So pretty soon I put on noise-canceling headphones and tune out ALL conversations, which negates most of the purported benefits of in-office conversations. - Commutes suck
    • rcme 4y ago
      Would water cooler conversations even happen if the participants felt they were being recorded for later reference?
      • tacotime 4y ago
        Strictly work related ones probably still would, but maybe at a reduced rate. What if there was the promise of a friendly AI used to filter out all non-work related discussions? Then a chatGPT model fine tuned based on previous team discussions, that automatically replies in the team chat any time it has some especially high confidence that it's generated a good answer to a new question. On my team, there is a lot of "tribal knowledge" that is known to part of the team, and buried in Microsoft Team's chat history somewhere, but having to use Team's search for anything is always the last resort. Maybe add a process where you have to wait for a team member to "like" the AI generated post before the person who posed the question uses the AI answer.
    • Popeyes 4y ago
      Yep. I get less work done on an in office day because I am catching up with colleagues or being interrupted by colleagues because I can't put a busy status on my chair.
    • rez9x 4y ago
      Mostly just to 'poke fun' at Amazon, but I'm sure all their employees watercooler conversations are well indexed and searchable.
  • Brendinooo 4y ago
    I've worked remotely for...9 years, I think? I do like facetime in the office, but I've found that as long as people are willing to give a little bit extra to the work chat and also make a real effort to put faces to names when you are in person, you can build meaningful connections wherever you are. Success in remote work is all about proactive communication and good use of tools.
    • jon-wood 4y ago
      Likewise, I think I’m now at 12 years majority remote. I actually prefer working in an office, but I moved out of London when my son was born and all the good jobs are there. I find a good balance for me is to be in the office once or twice a month, and on those days I don’t expect to get any real work done, it’ll all be either formal meetings or less formal catching up with people. At least in my experience this hasn’t really held me back, even in predominantly office based companies. I definitely miss a bit of gossip, but I saw a steady stream of promotions over the years, ending up in fairly senior management, and I had good relationships with everyone I worked with. I’m now in a different job which has a very remote focused culture - there is an office, but apart from one guy most of the technical team don’t really use it as much more than a hub for meeting up now and again.
  • ilickpoolalgae 4y ago
    I've mostly worked at FAANG and in general I think it breaks down to (but obviously generalization)... 1. Juniors like to come into the office. For those that went from fully remote to -> hybrid, they really relish the social aspect + mentorship they get from more experienced engineers. 2. Mid-level is split. Less experienced mid-level prefers WFH as they can work independently and the type of work they have does not generally require high levels of collaboration. For people that are close to senior it is split between those that do more collaborative work vs complex individual work. The former tends to prefer coming into the office vs the latter prefers WFH 3. Senior and above tends to prefer hybrid with 2 days or so in office on the same day. Most people at this level are either doing some form of mentorship and/or collaborating across multiple individuals both within and external to the immediate team. This work tends to be more easily facilitated in person. This area also tends to more likely have families and there is a split between those that feel coming to work provides them good Work/Life separation vs relishing the opportunity to step back from work for a second throughout the day to spend with family. I also see the tendency for those that come into the office to be perceived more positively, even when controlled for the actual outcome of work as well as whether the evaluator comes into the office or not. I'm a "senior" manager, and I personally feel like coming into the office or not doesn't really change my day. I'm basically in group meetings or 1:1's all day, so whether I'm in the office or not I barely spend any time at my actual desk.
  • ipaddr 4y ago
    Hybrid feels good but produces very little. The context switch tricks us into thinking we are more productive at those hybrid meetings and on those in person days it's about socializing
    • paulcole 4y ago
      > Hybrid feels good but produces very little. Isn't feeling good something worth producing?
      • chadlavi 4y ago
        Doesn't directly make line go up so company doesn't care, but you're right it should be.
  • iLoveOncall 4y ago
    I fucking hate it. I (work at Amazon and) already have to go in once a week, and I literally do NOTHING that day. Being at home allows me to delay answering coworkers so that I don't have to shift focus every 15 minutes between what I am doing and between helping Bob with his other shit. Being at home also allows me to not be in a constantly noisy environment, where even with top of the line noise canceling technology you still cannot focus properly. Lastly, the offices are NOT suited to handle the growth that Amazon has seen in the past 2-3 years. In Luxembourg for example it went from 4K to 6K employees, but no new buildings have been added (some have closed actually). Already when it was 4K employees, people had to go through MULTIPLE BUILDINGS before finding a seat that was free. And Luxembourg is not the office that grew the most, by far not. This is a disaster in the making. People are trying to justify RTO by "muh innovation". The truth is that you are not innovating 90% of your time. What you gain in "innovation" you lose 10 fold in actual productivity.
  • johnchristopher 4y ago
    > Random water-cooler conversation lead to meaningful ideas. Overhearing team members talking about some related problem gives you the chance to jump in. Also better for overall motivation from what I've experienced. I'll be that guy, so: People who were the most vocal about going back to the office... turned out they missed their work buddies more than work (I am okay with that) but me and my direct colleagues don't ever see them anymore at the water cooler. Those conversations have dried out. Oh, they are in the building, just behind their doors. The cafeteria is empty 90% of the time.
    • juve1996 4y ago
      These mythical water cooler discussions really are quite amusing. I'd say the water cooler discussions were more about things not work related than work related, or about office politics. I don't think I've ever had a "productive" water cooler talk without going in with that in mind already (i.e. I would've scheduled a meeting or walked to the desk anyway.)
      • gedy 4y ago
        Yeah in 20 years in industry, I've never experienced these important water cooler interactions. Important conversations need thought and be intentional.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    In addition to the other comments about the downsides of in-person, upsides also largely depend on people you work with actually being in physical proximity. If they're in a different city, building, or even floor you lose most of the potential benefits.
    • the_snooze 4y ago
      I think this is a really good detail you bring up. Often, I see the conversation talking about the absolute worst forms of in-office setups: cubicles or open office, with teams far apart, and long driving commutes everyday. In my world, my team and I are in adjacent shared offices (not cubes), and we all walk or bike to the office. It works wonderfully.
      • ghaff 4y ago
        I've been more remote than not for almost 20 years with it varying a bit depending on what I was working on. But, if I could walk to the office or even have 5-10 minute drive? If people I worked with were mostly there? I would absolutely come in some of the time.
  • fzeroracer 4y ago
    Water cooler conversations never lead to anything, other than me shooting the shit with Coworker Jim while I was waiting on my build to finish baking. I feel like people romanticize office working and it confuses the hell out of me. I never saw the benefits people argue existed across multiple jobs and no. Personally WFH has been nothing but beneficial for me. We still have informal calls which are more relaxed and similar to Discord calls for discussing problems or talking tech nonsense because we generally enjoy each others company, but if y'all aren't talking while WFH then moving to the office isn't going to change anything. Though there were a few people that liked to be annoying and just pop around desks to ask random questions and interrupt work.
  • jimbob45 4y ago
    Companies want to have it both ways and not have anyone notice what they're doing. If you want butt-in-the-seat work, you're getting 40 hours from every employee and nothing when they get home. If things break, they get fixed the next morning. If you want remote work, you're getting however much work is allocated per Scrum iteration. People will work weekends and evenings as they need. If you want both, you're going to have people finishing their assigned iteration work and then fucking around for the rest of their butt-in-the-seat office time.
  • dheera 4y ago
    I don't actually mind RTO 3 days a week as long as (a) it's not 5 days a week and (b) there is flexibility to work from a remote location for a month or two a year as necessary for family/relationships/seasonal-related mental health. I wish we had a cafeteria though, my location doesn't have one. Last time I went to the office I spent 40 minutes waiting at the Tender Greens across the street. UberEats usually runs circles around the office complex, gives up, and leaves my lunch at some random office building and then I have to hunt it down.
  • joegahona 4y ago
    I prefer coming into the office, but my commute influences my decision: 15 minutes of stress-free, pleasant driving, and I charge my car (free) at my office. Selfishly I wish everyone would come in -- way more productive side conversations, and more humanity. A coworker opened up to me a few weeks ago about a vacation that got denied, and just needed someone to vent to. That wouldn't have happened over a scheduled Zoom. I also suspect some coworkers are working 2 or more other jobs, or are just insanely checked out and filling their day with errands, long workouts, ballgames, etc. The same few people have "internet issues" all the time, etc.
    • cableshaft 4y ago
      > A coworker opened up to me a few weeks ago about a vacation that got denied, and just needed someone to vent to. That wouldn't have happened over a scheduled Zoom. Happens to me plenty of times, with multiple people (like I'll have a scheduled meeting with the PM and we'll do the meeting, then chat about some things, then it'll drift into bitching/venting about stuff at work, etc). I probably have had way more of those over Zoom than not, because there's no chance anyone can overhear us (assuming we're both not in the office). I think I tend to give off that vibe, though. Like you can share that stuff with me, and I'll understand and reciprocate and won't tell anyone because I'm obviously not playing office politics, not sucking up to anyone, I'm just there to do my job and help get others unstuck when possible.
    • baq 4y ago
      > I also suspect some coworkers are working 2 or more other jobs I suspect this is the real reason. The internet is full of people boasting about having 2, 3, 4, 7 senior jobs pulling in millions in TC doing nothing but interviewing for next sucker employers. If WFH ends, it’ll be because of them.
  • wvenable 4y ago
    Not having a commute is such a game changer for work/life balance that it's hard to give up. I would actually prefer to go into the office more often if I could instantly teleport there and home as needed. I'd rather read my emails in the morning at home, go into work, and leave early to spend the afternoon in silent working.
  • AlotOfReading 4y ago
    You get wildly different results depending on how the team and leadership adapts to the situation. Neither is guaranteed to succeed and either can work if the team is committed. For context, I work with hardware in a role most employers think is necessarily in-person. The team I started the pandemic with adapted to lockdown by spending $500/person on buying equipment and having "just chat" times a couple times a week or before meetings where you could talk naturally. Periodic in-person drinks/dinner/events and an active chat helped too. That worked really well and the infrastructure we built turned out to be useful for all sorts of automation where people wouldn't be physically present anyway. The team is overall in a better position than before. I also observed a team that didn't do any of that and simply went back to being in-person when lockdown ended. One way that manifested was as excluding remote workers from meetings/information flow. By complete coincidence, that team has trouble hiring and retaining people. When the people they do have take normal vacations or need visa renewals, they're completely unable to work because they never dedicated the time to building infrastructure around employees not being physically present. They're no worse off than they were pre-pandemic, but they effectively wasted 2 years.
    • nicolas_t 4y ago
      I've been working remotely since 2008 and what you describe has been my experience. Working remotely effectively requires leadership to change their ways. It only work if it's "remote first" and if there's no hybrid of having a some people being remote and others in the office. But making the effort to build a remote team does have a lot of advantages, automation has to be built in which, in the end, helps having greater flexibility when there are issues and people cannot be present. It helps with recruiting talent because you no longer restrict yourself to a single area... People also say that it's impossible to form friendships with remote coworkers but it's not been my experience, I've made a lot of friends with coworkers who live in different countries and timezones than my own.
  • CalRobert 4y ago
    I have a paid-off house in a beautiful place with gigabit fibre an hour from a major city by train. If I needed to go in to the office it would need to be for roughly €90,000 extra per year to offset that.
  • chadlavi 4y ago
    There's no legitimate reason to force knowledge workers to commute to a dedicated work space. It is a good practice to offer it as an option for those who want it, though.
  • theshrike79 4y ago
    I could be 100% remote, but I usually end up in the office 0-2 times a week just because some things are just easier when I knock on a door and chat compared to trying to do the same thing via Slack or Zoom. Also free snacks & drinks, great people and a nice atmosphere :)
    • symlinkk 4y ago
      “Easier” aka I used my physical presence to intimidate and/or pressure people into responding to me
      • theshrike79 4y ago
        The last person whose office I popped in to benches around 400 pounds and does MMA on a competitive level. I’m pretty sure my pudgy form can’t intimidate them even if I tried.
  • TurkishPoptart 4y ago
    WFH requires wearing clothes. I'm OK with this. Working in an office requires an "outfit", and in American culture you can't wear the same "outfit" multiple days in a row, for some reason, probably because of television. I dislike this.
    • ihatepython 4y ago
      > WFH requires wearing clothes. This has not been my experience.
    • fmajid 4y ago
      Wear a "uniform", as Steve Jobs did. He had multiple copies of the same jeans and turtleneck sweater, one less decision to make in the morning. Now Elizabeth Holmes famously copied this, but she wasn't a con woman because she cargo-culted Jobs, it's the other way round.
  • karaterobot 4y ago
    I took a work from home job 3 months or so before the pandemic, because I was already sold on never going into the office again. It's not that I'm extra-productive at home, it's that I was operating below my baseline level when working in the office, with its many distractions. For me, I consider the office a hindrance more than than working from home is a bonus. In late 2019, when I switched to remote work, it was not particularly hard to find a WFH job. It was a little harder than finding a job at an office. There were certainly fewer companies who offered it than there are now. At the end of quarantine, I think it's probably easier to find a WFH job than it was before the pandemic, and (ignoring the current job market) not much more difficult than ever to find a company that will let you work from the office if you want. What I mean is, people generally have a better set of options with respect to choosing how they want to work today, compared to late 2019. So, it's a good thing, except we still have to allow time for things to settle down. Companies who make all their employees return to the office will lose some of those employees, and companies who allow WFH will gain some of them. In the end, I still think it's a better situation than before.
  • dudul 4y ago
    What happens if you're not around while team members are having this random conversation? What if you're not next to the water cooler? When random convos happen in slack I don't miss them if I step away for a 15min walk. I can even search them.
  • ricardobayes 4y ago
    Personally, I enjoy being sick less, working from home. In an in-person job I was sick every year for a week or more. Now during these 2 years nada.
    • gedy 4y ago
      But "I'm not contagious cough sniff"
      • ricardobayes 4y ago
        And just like that, someone in my family got covid because their coworker decided to tough it out and come to the office sneezing their head off. Even though they have unlimited PTO and unlimited paid sick days.
  • fmajid 4y ago
    I am conflicted. The argument that individual productivity improves but teamwork and innovation suffers is plausible. Here is one data point: https://steveblank.com/2023/02/14/startups-that-have-employees-in-offices-grow-3-%C2%BD-times-faster/ https://steveblank.com/2023/02/14/startups-that-have-employe... I've also seen some pandemic data that individual unit productivity suffered, but was more than made up by the fact people worked longer because they did not have to endure the commute: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/finding/work-from-home-productivity-evidence-from-personnel-analytics-data-on-it-professionals/ https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/finding/work-from-home-prod... It probably also depends on the job function, software developers are likely more productive when they can work uninterrupted. WFH does not guarantee that, however, if you have young kids at home or a small apartment without a dedicated home office. I suspect companies will start offering perks like being able to "WFH" not from actual home but from a WeWork-like space that is a shorter commute from your residence. Some company cultures are clearly more congenial to remote working than others, and those companies will have a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent. Automattic (makers of WordPress) sold their underutilized SF office because no one was coming in anyway. Culture eats strategy for breakfast and I'm sure it's hard to impossible for a behemoth like Amazon to turn its culture around to be remote-first, even if they wanted to. Still, it would be useful for researchers to do proper studies on how to make this work. Making WFH more widespread would improve workforce participation, specially for women or caregivers when the population is aging, and thus benefit the economy as a whole.
• muh_gradle 4y ago
  As one of the comments say, employers really do have all the leverage right now.
  • mech422 4y ago
    Eh - I guess it depends on how tied to FAANG you are... Still getting plenty of inquiries from non-FAANG stuff.
    • muh_gradle 4y ago
      I'm not tied to FAANG. It's been pretty bad for me. 6 YOE looking for mid and senior roles all over.
    • ipaddr 4y ago
      It's a shift where many will avoid FAANGs because they start offering less upside. Stocks are down, public imagine slightly toxic and less benefits. When you subtract the cost of living close to FAANG people are going to go for more work life balance.
  • hikawaii 4y ago
    Not really. If they had all the leverage pay would be zero and hours would be infinite.
    • muh_gradle 4y ago
      Yes "all" is the important word there.
• sys_64738 4y ago
  They can make a request for it but doing that and people actually bothering are two entirely different things.
  • 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
    Lucky for them the industry is laying off tons of people, so they might end up with the upper hand in this one, unlike the last 10 years.
    • zwkrt 4y ago
      Yeah but you can't just lay off senior employees as a scare tactic.
      • davidw 4y ago
        When you're as big as Amazon, you probably can. They could coast for a long time and be ok.
      • none_to_remain 4y ago
        Getting fired for not reporting for duty is different from a layoff
  • crazygringo 4y ago
    You really think you're going to keep your job if you don't show up to work? Sure they'll always make a few exceptions, usually temporary for extenuating circumstances, but you'd better have a real good reason why you deserve special treatment.
    • sys_64738 4y ago
      I would simply continue to WFH. I don’t need to work for a woeful company that tries such antics. Amazon is a trash company in my view so I would be indifferent.
      • deleted 4y ago
• reilly3000 4y ago
  I feel like we are seeing cartel behavior with tech employment. I wouldn’t know how to prove such a thing, but I think it’s pretty clear that some collusion is going on.
  • bobleeswagger 4y ago
    [flagged]
  • jimbob45 4y ago
    This is what I find so frustrating. Every company running the same percentage of layoffs and bringing everyone back from WfH at once simply can't be a coincidence. How else can workers get their companies to negotiate with them as individual companies rather than cartel members but to unionize?
    • crazygringo 4y ago
      It's not a coincidence but neither does it need to be collusion. It's just similar companies responding to the environment (market, covid, etc.) in a similar rational way. And a bit of a herd mentality too, which is human nature. But that doesn't require collusion, it's just board members reading headlines.
      • DanHulton 4y ago
        "Rational" is arguable. There are a lot of analyses that would indicate that layoffs hurt your company in the medium-to-long term, even if it props up your short-term prospects. There are plenty of companies still haven't done layoffs (Apple), or have even raised employee salary (Nintendo, Sega) to ensure that employees feel safe and continue to perform at high levels. If anything, it's irrational behaviour. Herd mentality, prioritizing the short-term, fear-based, etc.
      • steve-atx-7600 4y ago
        Just like after all the smart guys in suites read books like The World is Flat and decided most work should be immediately outsourced to India as a fool proof cost saving measure.
• sjkoelle 4y ago
  this is great. been running through slu lately and we need some folks in the urban core
  • mjhay 4y ago
    SLU needing more people is certainly an opinion.
    • elseweather 4y ago
      It would be nice if that area was something more interesting than a corporate dormitory. Of course this change is ... not the way
• Brendinooo 4y ago
  If your company is the kind of place that's dead-set on using its office space, 3 in, 2 remote is a pretty good compromise. I thought we might have seen some companies downsize their space and require office time but make it more fluid. Has that happened, and are people writing about it? I figure very few companies will stay all-remote in the long term if they weren't already operating that way.
  • the_snooze 4y ago
    I see this "justifying office space as a sunk cost" argument a lot, but it seems like an oversimplied and very uncharitable read of the situation. It wouldn't surprise me if it were some minor consideration, but there are definitely advantages lost in a remote-only situation that are easier to keep in-person; properly integrating and socializing fresh-out-of-school employees, for example.
    • Brendinooo 4y ago
      My point was just that, if you're a company like Apple and you just spent $5 billion to build a corporate HQ, you're far more motivated to make use of the space than a company that rents out a skyscraper in the city. Wasn't trying to be uncharitable, there are certainly other reasons why you might want to be in person, but for an Amazon-sized company your choices are either use your buildings or let other people into your buildings, which is going to be some combination of hard or undesirable.
• whoknew1122 4y ago
  It's unclear whether this is for all employees, so I'd take it with a grain of salt. For example, my position is virtual--meaning I can work anywhere within my state and don't have a physical office
• neogodless 4y ago
  Related submission: From 2 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34837551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34837551 97 points, 105 comments "Amazon Mandating 3 days back in office come May first" (aboutamazon.com)
• softwaredoug 4y ago
  Companies that want to hire/grow junior talent do so remotely at their peril. Companies that rely on senior talent force in office at their peril. Therein lies the paradox IMO
  • ollien 4y ago
    As a junior(? definitely not senior, might be toeing the line of junior/not) remote employee, what's the peril here?
    • monksy 4y ago
      There is a vocal portion of Juniors who are struggling over the idea of making friends outside of college and have been seeking the work place as an option. Yes, before the downvoters/extroverts start going on: Yes, in person meetings are good on an rare occasion. However, the claim that you have to be in person/"be social creatures" to work effectively is drastically overblown.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • timr 4y ago
      The peril is that you're missing out on opportunities and education that you don't even know about, because it happens when people can spontaneously interact in the same time and place. I say this as someone who strongly preferred to work from home as a junior, and now sees that I was misguided. Looking back over my career so far, the best stuff has happened when I was in the office. A good portion of what happens in a high-performing office is spontaneous, and simply cannot be reproduced via asynchronous tools, even now. A lot of folks will tell you that this isn't true and that if we just somehow changed human nature and made everyone write every decision down (aka "a remote-first culture") there's no net loss, or mischaracterize in-office work as useless meetings or micromanagement or socializing (see sibling comment), but this is largely motivated reasoning. While there can be value in working that way, it's slower and less efficient -- a spontaneous 5-minute conversation will routinely save hours of writing and reading (which lots of folks won't do anyway). There's always percentage of people who strongly prefer to just go into a silo and code (and those people are over-represented amongst junior engineers; and junior engineers are over-represented on HN), and there's definitely a lot of bad/pathological office environments, but the reality of software is that it's a team sport. Communication is the O(n^2) problem, and in-office communication is just more efficient, even if it leads to a reduction in velocity for any particular person. One has to be nuanced -- everyone needs heads-down time, and that time can largely be done from anywhere -- but most teams benefit from spontaneous conversation, and most junior people benefit from this in ways that they don't realize. This is true even for senior people: at this phase in my career I can go into a cave and be very individually productive, but that's not really my job now. Literally every time I'm in the office something happens where I'm able to catch or head off an inefficiency or mistake, or learn about some project that helps my own work. This is immensely valuable.
• dcchambers 4y ago
  Since it seems that "bring employees back to the office" is the next "layoff 5-10% to appease shareholders," what are all these companies going to do that hired people all over the country and had employees leave the area when they switched to fully remote/fully flexible? Are they actually going to ask people to move? Otherwise if you're granting exceptions for a significant portion of your employees I don't see how the required WFO (work from office) actually gets the benefits you are hoping for.
  • tspike 4y ago
    Yeah, Walmart already is doing that. It’s a bonus round of layoffs without severance.
    • Ancalagon 4y ago
      Actually Walmart is also closing offices that were around in some instances a number of years before the pandemic. So they’re downsizing even further than expected.
      • gedy 4y ago
        Yes, such as San Diego, CA. Glad I did not accept that offer..
        • Ancalagon 4y ago
          The writing was on the wall, esp once Suresh’s real motives came out. I moved on less than a year ago bc of it.
    • SonOfKyuss 4y ago
      Walmart actually is paying severance for those who choose not to relocate.
  • sbrother 4y ago
    Several different teams at Amazon were trying to get me to join - from my home nowhere near an office - less than a year ago. Are they literally firing everyone who isn’t commuting distance from an office?
• neogodless 4y ago
  Related submissions From an hour ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34837551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34837551 (100 comments) From 30 minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34838828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34838828 (54 comments)
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • dang 4y ago
    We've merged them hither. Thanks!
• r0m4n0 4y ago
  Personally my theory is I think it’s less about leverage and more about real estate. Working fully remote at one of the most heavily invested tech companies, I have witnessed most of my coworkers that haven’t gone fully remote still work from home most of the time. Offices are either overcrowded or empty depending on the day. I think the powers that be want to fully utilize space by forcing folks to either go fully remote or commit to coming in sometimes. This gray area thing is probably a waste.
• somerando7 4y ago
  About time. The amount of value you get from having random conversation with your coworkers is too much to pass up on. Breakdown of communication through text also sucks.
• 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
  > the executive team made the decision earlier this week > He pointed to the ease of asking ad-hoc questions on the way to lunch or in the elevator. > It’s easier for leaders to teach when they have more people in the room and can assess whether the team is digesting the information as intended nauseating. a bunch of rich b*stards in a room making semi-arbitrary decisions that affects thousands of people without consulting them.
  • JohnFen 4y ago
    My problem with these arguments (the ones you quoted) is simply that I don't think they're true.
    • MuffinFlavored 4y ago
      They must have some data that shows people are more productive (whether it's against their will or not/whether they hate their lives sitting in traffic to and from work or not/whether they thinking being in the office surrounded by a bunch of people who are mostly fake is soul sucking or not) in the office. There's no way Google + Apple + Amazon + Meta are all aligned on "work from home isn't a viable option" without dating backing it. It's just an echo chamber here on HackerNews that we begrudgingly don't want to believe it.
      • JohnFen 4y ago
        Maybe they do. If so, they should share it, then, because it's certainly not readily available. It would go far to increase their credibility.
      • ssully 4y ago
        No, they have data on how much money they paid for office space. Thats all it is.
        • Fargren 4y ago
          I've heard this a million times, but isn't that a sunk cost fallacy? They don't get their money back when people come back, and they can either stop renting or sell. They aren't charging employee's rent for using the offices.
• tschellenbach 4y ago
  We are in a market where hiring good managers is extremely difficult. Remote work combined with some of your managers not being great can be really problematic. I love remote work, but it has some serious problems.
  • Ancalagon 4y ago
    No offense but what about in person work made good managers more effective? Arguably my interactions with managers did decrease after more work, but imho there effectiveness did not, assuming they were effective in the first place
• AISnakeOil 4y ago
  Exactly what we need, more traffic & crowded public transport in Seattle...
  • mtoner23 4y ago
    Such zero sum thinking...
• taylodl 4y ago
  Many employees were hired over the past two years being told they'll work from home - and have been. They simply don't live near an office. What's being done about them? Or is this a way to get rid of them without having to lay them off?
  • steve-atx-7600 4y ago
    I feel bad for the younger out of college hires. Anyone else should know better. If you expect a company to treat you better than they have to as required by contract/law - including keeping verbal promises - you will be screwed my friend. Wrong and right are independent of reality.
  • rnk 4y ago
    This kind of policy can also be a hidden layoff forcer. You never know what they actually want. They make ambiguous statements about vague gains, culture, etc. It's never concrete. It's just what they want.
  • bdw5204 4y ago
    I almost ended up in this situation. Interviewed with this company last summer and from the feedback I got, it sounded like they were on the fence about whether to extend me an offer. They don't have any offices in the Philly area and there's no way I'd consider selling my house to relocate when the interest rates have more than doubled since I bought it! Sometimes getting rejected in an interview for a job you really want can be a blessing in disguise. This decision also makes me much less interested in working for Amazon going forward. They definitely aren't living up to their own "Leadership Principle" about being "Earth's Best Employer" when they're doing unethical things like this. My advice to those who are in that situation is to make Amazon get rid of you so that you can (probably) file for unemployment. I'm not an employment attorney but my understanding of employment law is that quitting disqualifies you for unemployment but that a company ordering you to relocate to "return to an office" when you were hired to work remotely is probably constructive dismissal which is eligible for unemployment. This will also help if you need to fight them in court over repayment of your bonus. It may be difficult to find another job right now thanks to the Federal Reserve's monetary policy decisions so you might need the unemployment and/or bonus money to survive in the meantime.
• Xcelerate 4y ago
  So I guess we’ll see a rise of supercommuters flying cross-country 2-3 days a week, because I can’t imagine many remote employees either want to relocate back to the Bay Area (Seattle in the case of Amazon) or take a 70% compensation hit by picking up a job in the local market. I suppose for the east coast people you can take the first flight out to California Monday morning and get back home in time to wake your kids up on Thursday.
  • jakeinspace 4y ago
    Personally, I could imagine doing a long weekly commute like that if it were by train. I’m in Montreal, and if I were to take a hybrid job in Toronto, I could take a 5 hour train ride Monday afternoon (work on the way), get in around dinner, stay 3 days, and head home Friday while working. It would probably be a lot less pleasant than I imagine, and it would certainly be expensive, but if I’m getting a big pay raise then I think it would work fine. Doing 10 hours/week on a plane sounds hellish.
    • mitthrowaway2 4y ago
      I know people in Japan who take the bullet train on their daily commute to work 200 km away. I would find that quite comfortable, if someone would pay for it! But I definitely wouldn't want to do the same by plane.
  • steve-atx-7600 4y ago
    Most SWEs don't work at Amazon, Google or Meta. Maybe they'll just keep rolling along while their companies reap the advantageous reach into the national/global talent pool.
  • htag 4y ago
    $100/flight * 3 flights/week * 50 weeks/yr = $15,000/yr. The interesting part is the seems like a deal compared to cost of living of San Fransisco/Seattle and the salary slash of working in Phoenix/Las Vegas/Denver/Salt Lake/Boise.
    • 4y ago
• innocentoldguy 4y ago
  This is only tangentially related to the article, but I recently quit a 2+ year stint at Amazon where I was permanently designated a remote employee who could not be called back into the office (one of the stipulations I negotiated in writing before starting). Not only did Amazon try to weasel out of our written agreement, but I found Amazon's management to be toxic, their HR department lazy and ineffective, their base salary is bottom-rung and their stock isn't doing well, their benefits were the most stingy and dismal of any company I've worked for in my 30+ year career, they treat their customers like shit and their employees worse. The only benefit to staying the first two years was the sign-on bonus, which is spread out over your first 24 months. After that, you're better off working at a bootstrapped start-up. I was fortunate enough to have an excellent manager during my first year, but that is definitely not the norm at Amazon. I'm not sure why anybody works there to start with, let alone if they're forced into multi-hour long commutes everyday, just so they can be marginalized and abused in person.
  • steve-atx-7600 4y ago
    Can you give more details. What position? Examples of stingy benefits? I've considered joining Amazon as an experienced SWE to get experience working on apps with higher scaling needs. I'm thinking it could be worth putting up with some of the downsides I've heard about for awhile just to get this experience and move on.
    • innocentoldguy 4y ago
      Sure. They give you 8 paid holidays a year, their employee purchase program is basically a $100 gift card if you spend $1,000 on their website, but only on products they sell, their PTO benefit is very 1990s (accrued and limited), they subjectively apply their leadership principles (read arbitrarily beat you over the head with them), management is abusive, and their internal tools are jankey as hell. EDIT: Their sign on bonus is generous, so you’ll make a lot during your first two years, but after that your annual salary will drop significantly. Supposedly, their RSUs are supposed to make up for that, but they don’t.
• rayusher 4y ago
  How much more money would need to be paid to go back into the office? I would need a 20% bump to go into the office again.
• drewcoo 4y ago
  Well that sounds like a sneaky "soft" RIF. And neatly avoids triggering WARN. We should expect more of this.
  • great_wubwub 4y ago
    IBM pioneered remote work and pulled much the same trick a few years ago, and for the same reasons. https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-a-pioneer-of-remote-work-calls-workers-back-to-the-office-1495108802 https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-a-pioneer-of-remote-work-ca...
• softwaredoug 4y ago
  I’m going to suspect that HN is dominated by more senior folks with somewhat more established lives (like me). Often remote work is preferred for us. We already see work as more transactional, have more mobility, don’t benefit from the same level of coaching as juniors, and probably live farther away from a central office. Many of us could join a company and hit the ground running. What I haven’t heard much - here at least - is the fresh, brand new junior employee perspective. What does it mean to be hired out of college into a fully remote company? Without the structure required of an in person college? How do you become coached and mentored as intensively as junior employees need? How do you establish early professional relationships? Maybe in office had the benefit of paying it forward for these folks? From the senior generation helping acculturate the juniors to the company, but more importantly general technology culture?
  • alephnerd 4y ago
    (based on my conversations with friends, family, and peers who started during and after the remote work boom, and my own experience switching from Eng to Product during the pandemic) It depends on how your organization manages onboarding and communication. For a lot of junior emmployees, they don't get as much institutional support or ability to learn from watercooler conversations while being fully remote. When I started as a SWE, I was in the office and could pester experienced devs about this or that, and learn from conversations happening over lunch or over beers. While remote, that entire learning avenue shut down. In addition, most friendships are made thanks to the workplace. If you're fully remote, you aren't meeting other people and making friends. To some people that might be fine, but to others it's very restricting. That's a big reason why early-to-mid career (20-30) types prefer working in NYC over SF now - most other people our age are still there, while SF has become much older.
    • sage76 4y ago
      > making friends At the workplace? It only works in large orgs where your friend might be in a different department altogether.
  • Jcowell 4y ago
• tpmx 4y ago
  Including AWS? (their golden goose)
• fzeroracer 4y ago
  I feel one of the things people ignore for WFH is the 'social handshake' aspect for lack of a better term. Let me explain what I mean: When you're in an office, unless you're explicitly in a meeting Coworker Jim can walk by your desk, tap you on the shoulder and ask for help, or a talk, or to simply ask about your day. You don't have a choice in this interaction. Ignoring him is rude and often even when I told people I was busy they would persist or break my flow. When you're WFH, they can't do that. They send you a message on slack and you can choose to asynchronously respond, or schedule a meeting for later or if it's important to clarify something now hop on a call. A good team understands this and reorganizes everything to work around that asynchronous nature. I have a feeling the breakdown is that upper management hates this aspect. They can't stand that they can't simply walk the floor and annoy people or micromanage people as they see fit. Even if it's better for productivity, it's worse for them mentally. Which is why you see them cramming RTO or hybrid even when most people indicate otherwise.
• swyx 4y ago
  duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34838828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34838828 which was posted later but has higher points and more comments
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • dang 4y ago
    We've merged that thread hither. Thanks!
• jawns 4y ago
  I'm surprised that they coalesced around a "3 days a week in-office / 2 days a week work-from-home" arrangement. In some ways, that arrangement seems like the worst of both worlds. Unless everyone in the org works the same three days a week in-office, now you've got some people in office, some people still working from home, and coordination becomes more complex. Have you ever been on a Zoom call where half the people are in a conference room and the other half are working from home and calling in individually? It's a mess. Either the in-office workers completely dominate the conversation, or, if it's more evenly matched, it's a lot harder to understand the in-office people unless you have really carefully calibrated microphones for the room. Even if they were to agree on T/W/Th as everyone's in-office days, and everyone works from home on M/F, now you've got a large office space that is practically vacant for more than half of each week.
  • mtoner23 4y ago
    Most companies ive seen who do this, strongly recommend everyone prioritze coming in tues wed thurs. Sure the office is vacant for 2 days, but its already vacant on the weekends and that doesnt bother anyone.
    • Ancalagon 4y ago
      And so everyone schedules there new job interviews on Monday and Friday
  • hideo 4y ago
    > Unless everyone in the org works the same three days a week in-office Amazon had a culture of small teams (≤15 people) being somewhat independent. I would imagine that you don't need _the whole org_ there, you just need the whole team there.
    • kyleee 4y ago
      Yep so the decision should be decentralized to the teams and the case can be made for occasional in office days for inter team building, etc. maybe once a month for those within distance of office. Maybe a 2 days a quarter for those needing to fly in
• goostavos 4y ago
  Feels like a slap in the face to all of us that spent the last 3 years reliably launching new products. To say the least, it is obnoxious to be talked down to about the 'maybe' performance benefit of the theoretical "hallway conversation." Amazon's teams are globally distributed. We spent the last several years shipping real products all while working with people and teams for whom "a shared hallway" is thousands of miles removed. Sigh. (...Anyone looking for a (remote) senior SDE?)
  • steve-atx-7600 4y ago
    Sorry to hear that. I know a friend in the same spot at Amazon. Their global remote team has been successful and they bust their ass coordinating across time zones. So, I guess they quit or "work from the office" by themselves like at a WeWork.
• Yuioup 4y ago
  Sorry but I don't agree with employees working from home. The best ideas and collaboration happens at the office. Period. Edit: Fine, disagree with me.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • newaccount2021 4y ago
    [dead]
  • canyonero 4y ago
    > The best ideas and collaboration happens at the office. Care to back that up with some data or evidence? Otherwise, you're just blowing smoke.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • lightbendover 4y ago
      You think HR shills have evidence?
  • nly 4y ago
    "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man." -- The Dude
  • torstenvl 4y ago
    > The best ideas . . . happen[] at the office. I believe this is empirically false. Einstein, Newton, Curie, and most of the greatest scientific minds in human history worked alone. The same is true for literature, whether it's Chaucer in lockdown during an epidemic, or Shelley in a summer retreat, or Solzhenitsyn writing away in a remote cabin in Vermont. Teams are great at work, but I don't think they're great at the deep thought that results in new ideas, especially when surrounded by chit chat and buzzing overhead lighting. > The best . . . collaboration happens at the office. This is more plausible, but I'm still not convinced. In-person collaboration tends to be lazy and involves all kinds of weird social dynamics getting in the way of collaboration. Telework requires a bit more thought on the front-end, leading to overall higher quality of collaboration. Performative intelligence-signalling [what happens at most in-person meetings] doesn't contribute to collaboration. Putting real thought into solving a group task, and communicating that clearly in writing to your team, does. "Doing great work generally requires fairly large chunks of time alone." -Paul Graham https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1603172209308082184 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1603172209308082184
• user3939382 4y ago
  Almost all feedback I've heard from people who work at/for Amazon is negative. That goes for everyone from warehouse workers to programmers. I assume their comp is high, but they're still competing for the talent pool with the rest of FAANG/FAANG-alikes. If I'd taken months/years studying these big tech interview processes, academic algorithms/data structures, and leet code solutions, and self-agreed to sell my soul, Amazon would be my last choice.
  • rybosworld 4y ago
    One of the things that really sucks about interviewing at Amazon is that half of the interview is a kool-aid test. Did you study our leadership principles inside and out and prepare examples from your past work experience that illustrate said principles? No? That's too bad, you're not a culture fit. I think the people that stick around Amazon for a long time are in denial that it's Office Space come true.
    • Arnavion 4y ago
      Yep. The day before my interview, HR called me to link me to the "Amazon Leadership Principles" and told me to memorize one or two examples for each of them. Then during each of the five interview sections the interviewer would name one principle and I'd have to recite a story about how I accomplished it. Yeah bro, I totally demonstrated "Insist on the Highest Standards" by being really rigid on a code review that one time. Trust me, for real for real. I don't know what working there is actually like but the interview made it sound like a goddamn cult.
      • Moissanite 4y ago
        > I don't know what working there is actually like but the interview made it sound like a goddamn cult. I felt the same way on my induction ("Day 1"...) - it quickly became clear that the main relevance of LPs was as a weapon to automatically win an argument. Trying to get someone to do something they ought not really to be on the hook for? Ownership! Bias for action! Person objects to your suggestion because of a flaw in your logic? Think big! Dive deep! Disagree and commit!
• stcroixx 4y ago
  These companies need to be attacked/shamed from the eco angle. If they cared about the planet(we do, of course!), they would let as many people wfh as they could. They could have commercials showing all their happy employees wfh - petting their cat, enjoying lunch with their SO, etc. all while saving the planet and the employer gets all the brownie points.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • captainkrtek 4y ago
    Don’t forget Amazon’s “Climate Pledge”, more like an IOU than actual action.
• seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  My wife is an Amazonian who works in a distributed team. She would be going to the Seattle office three times a week to...have video conferences with people in the Bay Area, Minnesota, Europe, Asia...it really doesn't make much sense. Its not like her boss would keep track (since they aren't in the same city).
  • kupopuffs 4y ago
    Surely some of her team is in Seattle, no? That in of itself can be valuable
    • seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      They used to be, but re-orgs done during the pandemic when WFH didn't consider geography, so now maybe one or two? Also, she is a UXD, not SWE, so her role is really different.
• belval 4y ago
  > S-team listened to employees, watched how our teams performed, talked to leaders at other companies, and got together on several occasions to discuss if and how we should adjust our approach. > I’m also optimistic that this shift will provide a boost for the thousands of businesses located around our urban headquarter locations > just popping by a teammate’s office later that day with another thought I love this, return to the office to get your focused work interrupted, spend your hard-earned money around the headquarters, but most importantly because the "S-team" thinks you should. Andy Jassy probably never worked as an SDE if he truly thinks any of the above is motivating. > what would best enable us to make customers’ lives better and easier every day As someone working for AWS, better uptime, lower costs, and higher feature throughput. How about justifying return to office with hard numbers showing that we've fallen short on those points instead of just handwaving that "it's better".
  • rybosworld 4y ago
    That's the most frustrating part of these return to office announcements. The reasons for RTO are never based in rationality. It's because management has a feeling that certain things will improve. Also, it's often just a layoff in disguise.
    • thegrim22 4y ago
      To be fair, the evidence provided for why not to return to office also contains no data or numbers and is based purely on anecdotal personal opinions and feelings.
      • rybosworld 4y ago
        Agreed. There are studies around this topic. My issue is that, they are never cited when these decisions are announced.
      • belval 4y ago
        There's no evidence to provide if that's the preferred way to work, which we know because we've had a ton of internal surveys about it. People prefer working remotely, that part, at least for AWS, is not up for debate.
• tdhz77 4y ago
  There are some companies that have never had layoffs and are fully remote. Any thinking person should consider Jack Henry & Associates. 1976 until today.
• jksmith 4y ago
  Most arguments missing the nasty side of companies. Speaking from an execution consultant pov: Most companies still rely on the easiest form of getting something done, which is management telling people what to do. Current state of management is generally if they can't appear to tell people what to do, their ability to execute anything is greatly impaired, then their jobs are threatened. So where does most organizational leadership come from? Paying their dues as management in a prior life. So they're inculcated with the same mental model. Difference between a leader and a manager is, managers tell people what to do, while leadership like to tell their reports what they should have done. Anyway all these components feed the whole back to work thing. Managers keep their jobs by telling people what to do, and the easiest way to do that is via the official office environment. It's also the most expensive and inefficient way to get anything done, leading to most corporations having very mediocre delivery systems. That's my take after consulting with numerous F500s. Sure, there are exceptions; work dependent on equipment that isn't practical for remote applications, heavy experimentation with specific environment requirements, etc. But if your office life is centered around a laptop, then use the "laptop" as intended. So what's far more strategic is moving from managing people to managing the flow of value. Manager mind blown. The latter doesn't have the same dependency on having people come into the office, but it's a much more sophisticated approach requiring at least some interest in business systems engineering, which is more complicated. But the approach is far more efficient, cost-effective, and requires far less energy usage. Manager refrain: "Can't I just go back to telling people what to do, in the office?"
  • uxcolumbo 4y ago
    Interesting perspective. Do you have more details regarding managing the flow of value? Reading material or other resources that goes deeper into this?
    • jksmith 4y ago
      "Principles of Product Development Flow" This is an academic standard for queuing theory and flow of value by Don Reinertsen. Tough read btw. "The Fifth Discipline" by Peter Senge. This is a classic text that also covers the mental model side of the shift from managing people to managing flow. "Team Topologies" by Skelton and Pais. Another classic on team structure as it relates to flow of value. And well, have to mention my little book, "Agile V2 Coach's Field Manual" available on Amazon. Hardcover only. I need to write a rev, but still holds up regarding the concept of codifying behaviors into a delivery system, thus cutting down on politics, finger-pointing, unethical decision-making, and other crap that represents the legacy people-management model. Quick read. Lot more books available. This is a very rich area of study that's been around since people have been trying to figure out how to get out of each other's way for better outcomes.
• neonate 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/ApIYS https://archive.ph/ApIYS
• Abroszka 4y ago
  This is going to be hard. Amazon doesn't offer much at the office other than milk, tea, coffee and bananas. They will need to be less frugal to convince me to come to the office.
  • oblio 4y ago
    In many offices you don't get bananas :-)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• dxuh 4y ago
  Oh no. Since a large part of many medium-large sized tech companies' management style seems to consist of "copy what Amazon and Google are doing", I am scared of what silly decisions in other companies this might inspire.
  • mmaurizi 4y ago
    One of the places I interviewed at a few months ago said they were planning to enforce a hybrid work schedule "after Apple does". Apple does not have an office in or near our city.
• GreedClarifies 4y ago
  Andy wants it, upper management may want it, and Amazon thinks it has more leverage in the hiring marketplace than it did 3 years ago. That's the whole story here. It is very realpolitik. Amazon is a very data driven company, if the company finds out that recruiting or retention is becoming a serious issue due to this policy change then they will course correct. That is all.
  • captainkrtek 4y ago
    I agree with you, and believe it is based more on feeling and leverage than what’s best for the employee (obviously). However, In my experience at Amazon (going on 7 years), they are are slow to course correct or provide clarity. This guidance was handed down on a Friday, with no email, no forward notice to at least L8 or below leadership (Director), and relevant policy pages were unclear and hastily edited. This sent managers scrambling to provide answers to everyone panicked. And sends everyone off into the weekend with anxiety about their future. Its a non surprising but shitty feeling. Meanwhile we had an all hands meeting earlier in the week, this wasn’t even mentioned…
• jimt1234 4y ago
  This whole requirement to return to the office, when data shows that employees overwhelmingly don't want to - well, the whole story is super disingenuous. Not just from Amazon, but the entire labor market. First, before the pandemic, employees kept asking for more flexibility - the ability to WFH a few days a week because of rough commutes or family/home situations. The response from management was, "Sorry, we can't function as a company unless employees are in the office. Productivity will nose-dive." Then, the pandemic happened and management's story changed, "That thing you've been asking for, WFH - you know, the thing we told you wasn't possible because it would destroy the company, well, now we need you to do it in order to save the company." People did it, started WFH, and guess what - the company didn't die, productivity actually increased (I've read this in a few articles; don't have citations). So now that the pandemic is basically behind us, the story from management has changed again: "So yeah, that thing you wanted to do, WFH, but we told you it wasn't possible, but then a crisis happened and we told you that you had to do it, and now that you've done it for nearly 3 years with no harm to the company - yeah, the crisis is over, so we need you to stop doing it because it's destroying the company." Wait, what? The thing that was gonna destroy the company turned out to save the company, and now it's destroying the company???
  • Ancalagon 4y ago
    Should’ve slacked off more during wfh in the pandemic.
    • ricardobayes 4y ago
      Same, I worked my freaking butt off, didn't take a single day off during the past 2 years...
      • F-W-M 4y ago
        Same, had the two most productive years of my working life, worked my ass off, build them a system that now makes my salary 20-30 times. Now I am forced to come back in the office (and man did they fail that communication), don't see any real appreciation for the work I did, and I am like 20% as productive as prior. Funny thing: I am still meeting expectations.
• paxys 4y ago
  Upper management – employee productivity has gone way down in the last couple of years. Employees – yikes, sounds like we should do something about that. Can you tell us how you are measuring productivity? Is shipping velocity slower? Is our revenue lower than projected? Maybe we need to adjust priorities or roadmaps? Let's come up with a plan to make sensible product and process changes that will help us better hit our targets. Management – ... Employees – can we even say for sure that productivity is down? Management – we can, trust us. Employees – ok, what can we do about it? Management – 10% of you are fired. Employees – that will just make the remaining people less productive. Management – and everyone has to come in to the office 3 days a week. Employees – but we were hired as fully remote. Most of us don't even live near an office. What will this accomplish? Management – this will fix all our problems, trust us. Employees – but what problems are we trying to fix? The worst part of this is that a year later these companies will magically declare that all employees are 2.37x more productive now, and WFH was always a mistake. The corporate world/media will eat it up, and so office culture will get even more entrenched.
  • cardosof 4y ago
    Yes, that's how it works. There's no outside impartial judge looking at arguments from both sides to declare who's wrong, there's no law saying being a hipocritical and cynical are crimes. It's just people, relationships, employers and employees, and money.
    • laichzeit0 4y ago
      Well imagine if you worked your way all the way up to Exec level and for the last few years all you could do was dress up in your expensive suites just to sit in front of a webcam. You’d also feel like a complete clown. You want people in the office so they can see you walking from meeting room to meeting room and hear the sound of your leather (not rubber) soled shoes as you traverse through the corridors of mere mortals. How else do you assert dominance? People need to _see_ that you’re important and that you matter.
      • pm90 4y ago
• blatchcorn 4y ago
  I don't want to descend into boomer-bashing, however it is worth acknowledging that the S-team and most senior managers are boomers who bought cheap property that is big enough and close enough to work to raise families. The only chance a lot of young Amazonians have to raise a family is by remote working outside the city. It is quite easy for the S-team and empty nesters to mandate an office return when they are the least impacted by it. Even if the older employees relocated out of the city, they still got to ride the property boom. In contrast this decision forces young people to live (and presumably buy) where property prices have appreciated the fastest.
• slackfan 4y ago
  Heh, guess I'll be picking up some folks exiting amazon at some point in the near future. Fully remote for the last four years, now running my own company, I refuse to have a corporate office. Most business gets done at bars or in conference centers anyway, most work is done at a laptop and a wifi connection, and paying for the overhead of a space to force people to come into seems ludicrous. I can also recruit across the country, and reach talent that won't otherwise be available to $bigcos. Seems like a win for me, thanks Andy!
• horns4lyfe 4y ago
  I really don’t want to hear any of these tech execs bloviating about climate change after this nonsense.
• sidcool 4y ago
  I detest the managers and companies forcing employees to come in. I hope some of them lose employees to attrition.
• sknaj 4y ago
  "Earth's Best Employer..." Stack ranking, layoffs, and now micromanagement from Jassy himself. Just months ago, they were positively frantic to hire anyone they could get their hands on. I hope potential employees remember this when the market is on the upswing again.
  • Ancalagon 4y ago
    Agreed. Just say no to Amazon.
• sknaj 4y ago
  Amazon's office buildings are bad if you've ever had a proper office. My home setup is orders of magnitude nicer than their standing desks in a bull pen.
• choeger 4y ago
  This is a weird act of class struggle, I think. Management strikes back, if you will. I think what happens here is that management, or rather managers, feel like they are lacking something: And that something is the public display of hierarchy. No team lunches, no better office space for higher-ups, no dedicated parking lots, etc. Many perks of being a team lead, or tribe lead, or whatever depend on a fully staffed office and are essentially symbolic or offer only very little additional comfort. It reminds me of pre-boarding or security fast lanes for status customers at airlines (priority de-boarding has an actual value sometimes, but of course belongs to that expensive seat). With empty or even no offices, these perks have gone and managers miss their importance. What better to do than to slowly force these pesky SEs back to their desks, where they belong? But one has to move carefully, of course as to not scare them away. Hence the industry will follow the big tech here. These 3 days will soon become the norm, just wait for it.
  • deanCommie 4y ago
    Maybe out of context true, but given Amazon's famous frugality, that's just not the situation here.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• morog 4y ago
  I don't get it, people who work for megacorp and then object to rules of said megacorp. If you're bright enough to work in big tech, surely in this age of internet opportunity you can do something else that pays. Maybe you won't be rich but you can live the life you want.
  • recuter 4y ago
    Lets see if we can crack this mystery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkQbHyLE6Tc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkQbHyLE6Tc
    • rocketbop 4y ago
      I don’t understand the anger at this woman. The video she posted just showed what the office is like. She didn’t design it nor did she display any real entitlement. Edit - I refer to the anger in the YouTube comments rather than in parent’s comment.
      • undersuit 4y ago
        It's a 0:01:26 minute video and she didn't do an 8 hour work day! /s
      • recuter 4y ago
        The anger at this woman was also rather unjustified if you know your history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette Maybe it is a vibes things. Who knows.
  • TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    Some people think labor should have some say over how their work is managed.
    • vasco 4y ago
      Some people should start companies or realize that if they accept to work on someone else's they should see what they are getting into before starting.
• DarthNebo 4y ago
  Insecure managers realising that peeping over shoulders metaphorically was half of their work & now that once requirements are finalized & work gets delivered they're like we really dont need this middle management.....
  • LewisVerstappen 4y ago
    Yep, Zuck realized exactly this and FB is now getting rid of a ton of middle managers
• pfoof 4y ago
  Easy, use Tim's Ferris technique - perform less in the office on purpose, perform better at home on purpose.
  • kleiba 4y ago
    ...and hope that they will not notice the former?
  • karmasimida 4y ago
    Amazon will PIP that one person. Amazon isn't Google, it doesn't care about its image, like ... at all.
    • Frog0fWar 4y ago
      I'd say Google also doesn't care. Googleyness is gone, top-notch job security is gone, leadership doesn't listen to employees at all, the only thing that matters now is appeasing stakeholders.
    • juve1996 4y ago
      Can't PIP everyone. Most companies I've worked at had a large majority of people adding as little value as possible.
      • burna_aws_acct 4y ago
        Amazon: Hold my beer...
  • indrora 4y ago
    With how Amazon's performance reviews go, which are seriously two questions ("what's your/their superpower" and "what could you/they improve") and an aggregate from your manager, nobody will notice.
    • dannyw 4y ago
      amazon seems much better at managing out poor performers . what gives?
• franze 4y ago
  a friend of mine was HR head for a semi-big startup with about ~200 devs. after the 1,5 years of corona they looked at the numbers and evaluated if they should get the devs back into the office overall productivity stayed the same (after the chaos of the first corona lockdown has settled) for all measurable metrics. but individual productivity showed major changes, some completely faltering, some performing much better. for most of them it stayed more or less the same. hypothesis: the loss of f2f communication was counteracted with more time to focus. and yes, they did let go those of who did not perform any longer. also the hypothesis was that most of them were not so great from the beginning, but were able to "swim" with the rest of the teams. (some exceptions) the upside was also they now they had a much bigger pool of pot. hires in eastern europe which they did not had before.
  • redrove 4y ago
    Seems to me like a good argument to give the performers a raise, promotion, what have you. Sounds harsh but maybe even let some of the slackers go. All depends on the direction the company culture wants to take; more focus, more skill or more communication. Either is fine, but the leadership should pick one and stick to it.
• sime2009 4y ago
  Tech workers: "Management treats us like faceless cogs in a machine! They only care about grinding productivity out of us." Also tech workers: "How dare management require us to go to the office! I can do my work perfectly fine from home over Slack. I don't need that office socializing BS. It's a waste of time."
  • seydor 4y ago
    those are not contradictory
• refurb 4y ago
  This was inevitable with the downturn and layoffs. When you're desperate for labor and always have a surplus, you just bend to employees. Like the tech bubble in 2000 with people bringing pets to work. Then when the money doesn't come in as fast and you need to shed workers, you stop bending to demand. Because hey, if people leave, well, they'll be someone else who doesn't mind coming into the office.
• mkl95 4y ago
  I used to be really excited about FAANG opportunities. I still get those Google emails but I'm only interested in Apple these days, since are the only ones not doing some stupid thing every few weeks.
• imhoguy 4y ago
  Maybe we need remote workers union. Like we needed such for industrial age workers to mandate 8h day and free Saturdays.
• jxf 4y ago
  When people say software developers should unionize, this is why.
• say_it_as_it_is 4y ago
  Amazon finally stopped growing exponentially and now the executives are desperate. A year from now, executives will say that they are going to mandate everyone return to the office for 5 days a week because random conversations in the hallway 5 days a week will help the company return to exponential growth again.
• gorgoiler 4y ago
  The most common refrains I hear about return-to-office are: (a) employees moved away from the city during the pandemic for cheaper housing on the same salary and don’t want to pay a premium to move back; (b) senior-ish engineers shirking their leadership responsibilities by claiming their role just requires them to focus on writing code all day; (c) junior engineers underestimating how much social contact they need to learn on the job; and (d) established employees failing to empathise with the new hires who have never met any of the team.
• sanatgersappa 4y ago
  If you don't have fuck-you-money, chances are you're getting fucked everyday.
• andirk 4y ago
  Let's remember when Marissa Mayer took over Yahoo and quite successfully turned the company around for the better, all while being pregnant if I remember correctly and if I don't then wtf, she banned working from home. https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/marissa-mayer-defends-her-famous-002940476.html https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/marissa-mayer-defends-her-...
• noam_compsci 4y ago
  I don’t understand two things: - don’t waste time on random slack chats and emails - get inspired with random coffee chats and office drop ins. Lmao
• nikolay 4y ago
  I love working onsite and observing my coworkers spend 30 minutes making breakfasts and taking 2-hour lunches and finishing a 1-hour meeting in 20-30 minutes and then spending the rest of the blocked time just talking about anything but work as they have a proof on the calendars that they've actually worked. Some of my best memories from work are of people starting to fall asleep during meetings scheduled shortly after lunch when everybody's hypoglycemic due to the insulin putting off the carb-heavy lunch! Very productive, no doubt! I've never seen a software engineer put more than 3-4 hours of productive work onsite! Meanwhile, after 10 years being exclusively remote, I've put tons more productive hours working from home a day. In fact, knowing I'm privileged, I put in more than 40 hours/week most weeks - not because my manager tells me to, but because I want to! You can build a mediocre product with micromanagers - no doubt, I've seen it, but I've never seen great products being built under such poor, primitive management strategy! If you really want a great, performing, and creative team, then do a better job at hiring and motivating people! Policing works only for certain types of jobs, not for jobs where managers are less smart than the workers! And I yet must see proof that exchanging viruses onsite is more productive than online meetings, which could also get recorded, etc.
  • blablabla123 4y ago
    Lunch is a big one. Working remotely since the pandemic started I haven't ate this healthy in almost a decade. (And I don't need a coffee after lunch to not be sleepy) Also I've seen much higher quality 1:1 meetings.
    • pm90 4y ago
      Seriously. Trying to keep oneself functioning after work vs just taking a nap and getting back to work, refreshed is sooo good.
      • pmg102 4y ago
        After work or after lunch?
        • 4y ago
• oars 4y ago
  > September 2022: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says he has no plan to force workers to return to the office > https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-force-amazon-workers-to-return-to-the-office.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc... Looks like he has a plan now.
• andsoitis 4y ago
  this is fantastic news for companies who have embraced remote!
• millzlane 4y ago
  I will literally just call in remote everyday. What are they going to do? Disconnect my VPN. Oh sorry I had some car trouble...but I can jump on VPN and clock in for my shift. I literally don't need to talk to another coworker or manager to do any of my tasks. This is stupid and I suspect it's to thin the herd. Luckily this is my second full time job so I'm not afraid of treating amazon like they are treating me. Editing to add: That I also recognize my privilege and am grateful for the opportunity to work at one of the biggest employers I have encountered.
  • aleister_777 4y ago
    Wow. The delta between the entitlement that you have for your "second full time job" and your expectations vs the reality of the history of people going to work is pretty astounding.
    • millzlane 4y ago
      What delta? What entitlement? The terms of the deal have changed. I checked my offer and the offer was for a remote position. Yea my second full time job wasn't given to me. I worked hard and I chose them to do business with. I am the CEO of my "enterprise". So this isn't an entitlement. It's what I worked hard for. When I interviewed there they thought they were interviewing me. I was interviewing them. I chose them to work there they didn't pick me. I don't owe them anything accept for what I agreed to when I contracted out my future self. I enjoy the business relationship I have with them. If the terms of that relationship change. Then I will re-evaluate and make the best decision for my "Company". It' really as simple as that.
  • brianwawok 4y ago
    Do you think it’s optimal for quality and learning the business to be locked in a silo all the time? Or is this just what you like the best?
    • millzlane 4y ago
      Honestly what silo? I get updates everyday when I login. I get emails that update me. I have meetings slack channels to the most important teams that are online 24/7. I honestly haven't felt siloed in my position one bit. Everything I need to do my job is there in the network. All the documentation I need. All the previous slack messages to search. company wide searches for any info not related directly to my position. And updated docs that are literately so easy a 15 y/o could follow them if they know how to read and pay attention to detail. There is literally no reason whatsoever for me to be in the office. Besides in person there is literally nothing I can do that I can't from home. I don't need to see the person to learn from them. I don't need to hear them to understand what they are telling me. And I don't need to physically be there to be productive. I was able to do the job out of my car and still help others while parked on the side of the road for two minutes while I answered a question they could have found the answer to if they RTFD. I don't know if I liked it better because this was the first legit remote position I ever had and it seemed smarter in every way how it was done. This does not seem like a smart move to me and I can't quite put my finger on it. But I don't think this will increase productivity.
• Romen_b 4y ago
  In my teams there are engineers from all across EU that are working with teams in Dublin. I have no idea what does this mean for those people because for them to be in the office in Berlin means nothing about co-location, and physical proximity to rest of their team.
• bamboozled 4y ago
  Honest question, there's a lot of posts here about people finding the office distracting, but does anyone else think working from home can be equally or more distracting? I honestly used to feel bad when in the office if I was on Youtube or Instagram, I just didn't really do it. But when WFH I could have unlimited access to anything without people knowing, even porn if I wanted. I also remember the feeling of having others around me working pretty hard and kind of fed off that, like I wanted to be part of a team who was delivering and while I still have that feeling, I feel less guilty if I slack off when remote and I notice the whole team going through waves of slacking off, and then someone pulls the team back together to be motivated. I have strategies to get myself into working and I can be productive, I'd argue I often am productive because I care a lot about where I work and what I work on, but it's not just "magic" that I'm just sitting in my room at home and all of a sudden I'm ultra productive? I really have to work at it, especially if I'm not working on something exciting. People also come distract me, neighbors ,friends, family even delivery people etc. Slack and email are for me, huge productivity killers and distractions and still are if remote or on-site. So that distraction has never gone away for me. I think being a productive remote worker is a skill that I'm still learning and an investment I have to make, my own office renovations, furniture etc, and I've been doing it since before the pandemic. I hate to say it, but I think most people know deep down inside and are admittedly defending WFH as by default being better from a productivity standpoint when really, it's probably just better on a personal level and so they want to keep it. I think that's fine because I agree, if I had the choice, I'd be remote too, forever. I'm just not really sure people are being entirely honest with themselves and their motives and it would be refreshing to see a bit more of that honesty shine through without the constant, "I'm just more productive at home by default, I work 10x harder and more hours etc". It would be nice to live in a world where employees and employers just said, "You know what, who cares about the productivity aspect so much, let's just embrace the technology we create to make our lives better and embrace working from home even if we actually do take a 10% productivity loss", it's wishful thinking but it would be nice :)
  • rk06 4y ago
    The main problem with this kind of corporate mandates is that they are mandatory. People have diverse backgrounds, experience and needs. Therefore it makes sense that a sizeable portion will hate whatever corporate mandate is forced upon them. Smart decision would be to let employees decide. I work at Microsoft and we were told that we can choose between 100% WFH, 100% office or something in between. We could even change our office location to other place more convinient.Everyone was happy with this
• miga 4y ago
  Remote working was a big threat to influenza and other virii, but with so many employees requiring return we will get our flu back in no time.
• lumost 4y ago
  My two cents: Companies have offered remote/semi-remote roles to highly skilled/productive individuals for decades. SWE's who stayed as ICs often switched to remote after ~4 years if they built a good rep with senior management. Pre-Pandemic it was common to see "in-office" firms seeking remote talent with rare specialty skills such as DB internals as either contractors or full-time employees. There was usually a tradeoff with these roles that you had to make your own career. Applying this model to junior engineers, open ended collabs, and non-specialist labor doesn't seem to be working all the time. A few trends I've observed. - Some staff are putting in heroic efforts, and some do nearly nothing - Management doesn't have any idea that someone on their team is working 80 hrs/week sitting next to someone working 20. - If an uncomfortable decision must be made, it's trivial to punt on the decision indefinitely. - Teams may view their job as "doing the minimum", it's common to see teams where everyone is silent 24/7. - Engagement is hit/miss. I've heard many of my younger colleagues struggle with finding a social circle in a new country/city/life phase. The only time I see this pattern break is when a project lights on fire - but that is unsustainable.
• akaike 4y ago
  I hope everyone who can afford it will just quit
• ericmcer 4y ago
  This all seemed really predictable: the cross-industry layoffs followed by the hard line return to office demands. I don't want to say it was collusion, but the shift of narrative from tech workers have leverage to tech workers should be begging for their jobs did require all the big players to make huge cuts in a short time period.
• wood-porch 4y ago
  It appears I’m one of the very few happy about this change. I miss my colleagues at work and having fun discussions about programming, investing, podcasts. I miss the adhoc discussions about a problem someone was encountering and helping them fix it. I miss talking to new people in the kitchen about what they did that weekend. I miss playing board games with a group of 10 people from different departments and teams. I miss the happy hours, the excitement, the kickoff of a new project. I loved my job, then WFH happened, I switched teams, found that still boring, went to another company, left within 3 months because that was still boring. I’ve lost a lot of joy from remote work. I’m excited that within the next 2 years I’ll be able to find a place to work that doesn’t work remotely, because, frankly I hate it.
  • ecopoesis 4y ago
    Literally none of what you listed is work. Board games, happy hours, friends: these are all things you can (and should) be doing in your non-work hours.
    • dopeboy 4y ago
      For some of us, work is where our social circle. Not all of it and definitely not a reliable one. But if I’m spending 8 hours a day with people, I’m likely to develop friendships with them since that’s easy.
  • dopeboy 4y ago
    I’m right there with you. Turns out talented people tend to be really interesting people to talk to. My favorite moments over my career were in person, often late at night when we were solving a hard problem. There is something about working on difficult challenges together and the bonds that form from it.
  • captainkrtek 4y ago
    That’s all great to hear, but I think what most of us are frustrated about is the mandate aspect. You are welcome to go to the office every day if you want, and if you want to see coworkers in the office who are friends then go plan that with them. For the rest of us its been a roller coaster of wfh being forbidden pre-covid, to wfh being what “saved the companies”, to now it being a problem all while we’ve delivered for the company (Ive been with AWS for 7 years). All the while, folks like myself have had to make decisions like where to buy a home given messages of “amazon has fully embraced wfh/remote work, we won’t be forcing a return to office” [1] to now this… its out of touch from reality. 1 - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-force-amazon-workers-to-return-to-the-office.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• gtirloni 4y ago
  Remote work is already established industry wide and it works. It makes me think capital just want to show's the boss.
• revlolz 4y ago
  Every respectable team is lead by a manager and director who respects a person's choice to be most productive. In office, remote, hybrid... The sweet spot has been personal choice and every team I've seen in the shithole known as amazon who has touted some nonsensical horse puckey where they "have data" demonstrating otherwise is just flat out lying.
• j7ake 4y ago
  For doing work that nobody knows exactly how to accomplish (eg going into the unknown), one iterates towards a solution by getting feedback through casually discuss ideas, listen to others seminars, and formally discuss in in-Person Meetings. Virtual takes away a lot of those serendipitous opportunities. That being said, there are times when virtual is fine, eg once a project is well-defined and one needs to just deliver, or when doing admin paper work, or when reading.
• faangiq 4y ago
  “Nice!” - guy who gets paid 100 million to sit around and write “Nice!” in emails once a week, which is still more than his replacement does.